Paul Johnson Quotes

In Germany, as in parts of Yorkshire, laughing — at least among people with pretensions to rank — was regarded as a form of weakness. Goethe, whose own laughter was seldom observed, thought a lady might laugh where a gentleman should keep a straight face. Frederick the Great might laugh with a Frenchman, such as Voltaire, but “would not so condescend” with his compatriots.

With Lenin he shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer crankiness he had much more in common with Hitler (…) One of his favourite books was Constipation and Our Civilization, which he constantly reread. (…) His eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India’s problems. (…) His food policy would have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi’s own ashram (…) had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. And Gandhi was expensive in human life as well as money. The events of 1920–21 indicated that though he could bring a mass-movement into existence, he could not control it. Yet he continued to play the sorcerer's apprentice, while the casualty bill mounted into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and the risks of a gigantic sectarian and racial explosion accumulated. This blindness to the law of probability in a bitterly divided subcontinent made nonsense of Gandhi’s professions that he would not take life in any circumstances.

Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.

He took Gaza, then Jaffa, where, fearing trouble from his 4,500 prisoners, he ordered them all slaughtered, which was done by bayonet thrusting or drowning, to save ammunition. Many women and children suffered in this atrocity, probably the worst of all Bonaparte’s war crimes.

Ibsen was saying to humanity: ‘Be yourselves!’ Yet in this letter he was in effect admitting that to be oneself involved the sacrifice of others. Personal liberation was at bottom self-centred and heartless.

The cultural and political strands of change could not be separated, any more than during the turbulence of revolution and romanticism of 1790–1830. It has been noted that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin were all resident-exiles in Zurich in 1916, waiting for their time to come.